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This strategy of collecting email addresses without delivering anything first never seems to die down.

The reason is simple: it works. Many people will hand over their email address with no guarantee of anything in return. A shockingly large number of people will do that. And then the opt-in spam begins. It's a never ending email campaign for who knows what. Does the spam work? Surprisingly, yes. Enough to be worth paying to keep sending it out. Legalised spam.

Is an email address worth something? Gather enough of them and yes, absolutely it is.

This is all pure speculation. Or is it?

If I had a dime for every site that collects email addresses without delivering anything first...

As if Mozilla didn't have enough data about users already.

Anyway, if you wanna see what this thing is here you go:

http://github.com/mozilla/napkin/zipball/master

Unzip the file and start reading.



download brew and install redis... nah, no time to do that just to get a preview of how it works.

Well, it may be the bees knees, but I'm not doing all that to get a look at it.


I am 100% in agreement. I would never make users jump through hoops like that. Or assume that Redis would be their choice of database. That's a choice for the user.

But Lord knows I spend an inordinate amount of time jumping through hoops like these just to try evaluate software. It's just unavoidable.

A small, simple program with no dependencies or assumptions about your software preferences is like a breath of fresh air.

I wonder if there's an easy way to filter all of Github for these types of programs. Say, C programs with less than N LOC, and having no external dependencies.




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